Making Room

Noise floor

I was in a bustling cafe having a morning meeting with a CEO client when the power went out.

Suddenly, the coffee machine hissed to silence, as did the back-of-house kitchen noises, the music stopped mid-verse, the wall-mounted TV turned black. What we both noticed was how quiet it became.

We were both quite shocked at how much background noise we take for granted. When even the fridges, the aircon and the lighting stops, the noise floor drops precipitously.

But what also surprised us was how easy our conversation suddenly began. Not just because most of the patrons left, but because the silence enabled us to focus on the discussion, to pay real attention to each other. Our mood was somehow lighter.

What I thought about afterwards was something many of my clients tell me. That they simply don’t have enough time for thought. They’re employed to make good judgements, but they’re too busy (in meetings, reviewing reports, dealing with administrivia) to give those judgements the reflection necessary.

If you ever watched Mad Men, the ad executive Don Draper spent a lot of time on his office sofa (yes, whiskey in hand) day dreaming.

Question: How do you quieten the noise around you?

Getting to the quick fix

Imagine you wanted to fix blindness in poor countries (like the Fred Hollows Foundation does). What about stopping the destruction of natural habitats to protect endangered species (like WWF)? Or, fix slum dwellers’ access to water and sanitation (like Monash University’s RISE program)?

What you won’t be doing is working fast. Or working on just one variable, or using just one intervention. But you can multiply available resources to create impact. Here’s how.

The key is to understand the structure of the change you’re creating.

• Fred Hollows isn’t just an eye clinic. Its structure of change is transferring developed world expertise at scale to developing countries. (It “amplifies” roughly $100m a year to do this).
• WWF isn’t just an environmental advocacy organisation. It know that to reduce the human economic impacts on the most at-risk natural environments the structure of change it uses is getting consumers to mobilise industry to self-regulate environmental protection. That’s why it uses some of its EUR$1b budget on getting the “Love your Planet” logos onto the toilet paper you buy from Kimberley Clark.
• Monash University isn’t just running a research project. To bring water supply and sanitation to slums, it uses a mix of bio-engineering and social engineering, and its structure of change is creating ‘living laboratories’ to build an evidence base that politicians and ministries can get behind. Total funding leveraged to date is just $100m.

Right now, I’m working with numerous organisations on their ‘theories of change’ and they include:

• The UN transforming global supply chains (like textiles, mining and plastics) to reduce (or completely remove) pollution and waste;
• A social services peak body reducing the poverty that arises because some are disempowered while the majority are prosperous;
• The professional body representing general practitioners wants to transform primary care by making the economic case for redirecting people from hospitals.

So, quick fixes simply don’t exist for so-called ‘wicked problems’. But we can find the most concise way to show how the structure of change can be created from modest resources.

Question: Do you have a compelling theory of change?

Satisfied?

As regular readers will know, I often combine my visits to the UN in Nairobi with a short safari of a few nights.

I’ve therefore seen many many apex predators eat their meals. I’ve watched a cheetah rip apart a dik-dik (look them up) and a pride of lions (including four tiny cubs) systematically devour an entire buffalo.

But, after they eat, they are sated. For lions, this means several days of luxuriating, full bellies signalling ‘enough’, until the cycle begins again.

I ruminated on our societal hunger for ‘more’ and our difficulty in accepting ‘enough’ and it made me think of a German client I had years ago. I asked her how she felt about our project’s progress.

“It is satisfactory”, she replied, without a smile.

I grew panicked, as I was accustomed to more effusive responses, so I probed further. “What could we do differently? Are there particular areas you’d like us to focus on?”

This time she responded more sharply, “I said, “I am satisfied”. There is no need for more from you”.

I went home and reported this to my wife, Kate, who happens to speak fluent German. She explained that “Ich bin zufrieden” literally translates as “I am satisfied” but it actually means “I am happy”. Its deeper expression is recognizing the importance of a source of pleasure — more similar to the word ‘sated’ in English: the feeling that nothing more can be added.

All of this caused me to think that, in English-language business and organisational life at least, we need a better vocabulary for ‘enough’, or ‘sufficiency’, so that we pull back from an often unthinking addiction to ‘more’ and ‘better’.

Question: In your organisation, what is the right balance of satisfaction and striving?

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Until next Friday, enjoy making room to do the important things,

Andrew